Benedikt Meurer

Motivation

During the Xfce 4.0 days we used to keep the files generated
by autoconf, automake, libtool
and friends in the CVS repository. Even worse, we also
kept a copy of the required additional M4 macros per
module in the m4/ subdirectory. The idea was to
ease the installation of versions checked out from CVS for the
average user.

But that turned out to be a very bad idea. Not only was there a lot
of unnecessary traffic on the repository when somebody had to change
a Makefile.am or a similar file, but the whole thing
turned into a maintaince problem as well. Whenever I changed one
of the M4 macros - fixing a bug or adding functionality - I had to
commit the change to all modules (including the goodies) and
rerun autogen.sh on all modules afterwards. As you might
guess, this was neither very funny nor very productive.

The solution was obvious: Drop the automatically generated files from
the repository and bundle the M4 macros and related stuff within a
single package. And this is exactly what xfce4-dev-tools
provides. And this effectively means, that starting with the Xfce 4.3
development branch, everybody that wants to build Xfce right from the
SVN repository version will need to have the xfce4-dev-tools
installed. This also applies to non-core applications like Xfmedia.

Stable releases

Getting the source from SVN

The Xfce developer tools - just like the other core components - are available from
the Xfce SVN repository, which means that you will need to install a Subversion client in order to be able to check
out from the SVN repository (you can use the web
interface for browsing the repository).

You can download the latest version of xfce4-dev-tools using the following
command:

This will create a new directory xfce4-dev-tools in the current
path, which contains the latest version from the repository. Please read
the README
file to learn more about the public Xfce Subversion repository layout.

Building and installing

If you downloaded a release tarball, you can simply run

./configure --prefix=/usr/local

now (you may want to adjust the prefix to point to another
directory, tho). Else if you use a SVN snapshot, you need to run

sh autogen.sh --prefix=/usr/local

instead, because the automatically generated files have
been removed from the repository as mentioned above.

Next, you continue with

make
make install

where the install step must be done with
superuser privilegues. That's all.

Building other components

Once you have the Xfce developer tools installed, you can use them to
build other components, like for example the Xfce core components for
Xfce 4.4. Most of these components will contain a autogen.sh
file, which takes care of everything for you. Just execute that file
if present.

But some components may also come without the autogen.sh
script. In this case it's usually sufficient to run xdt-autogen
(which is part of the developer tools) in the toplevel source directory
of that component.